Bill Easterly resume la discusión aquí y ofrece su propio bottomline: “Does a poor country government have a comparative advantage in discovering a poor country’s comparative advantage? A corrupt, low-skilled, poorly-funded government does not have a comparative advantage in finding the country’s comparative advantage.”

Por su lado, el paper de Harrison y Rodriguez sugiere que:

While the literature on trade and growth linkages faces many challenging problems, we suggest two general lessons that may be drawn from the voluminous evidence. First, there was no signicant relationship in the second half of the twentieth century between average protection levels and growth. Second, there is a positive association between trade volumes and growth. We interpret the lack of a signicant association between average tariffs and growth, combined with the strong relationship between trade shares and growth, to suggest that any successful Industrial Policy strategy must ultimately increase the share of international trade in GDP. The fact that so many countries have been unsuccessful in o¤setting the anti-trade bias of their interventions may explain why so many have failed to succeed at Industrial Policy.

Industrial Policy and The Role of the State in Promoting Growth

William Easterly- New York University and NBER
Ann Harrison – Research Manager, Development Research Group, The World Bank
Justin Yifu Lin – Chief Economist and Senior Vice President, The World Bank